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    Northeast's love for Turkeys and the challenges faced by those raising them

    Synopsis

    There are not all that many turkeys in India – 4,23,374 in the census, compared to 80.78 crore chickens. But this represents a whopping 66.8% increase over 2012, so clearly more people, particularly in Assam, are raising turkeys. Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura also have relatively high numbers of turkeys.

    TurkeyGetty Images
    Turkey Twizzlers, processed turkey extruded in spiral shapes, have become notorious in the UK as a symbol of cheap, but unhealthy school food.
    In the Livestock Census conducted in 2012, Assam had the third most turkeys (9.9%), after Tamil Nadu (24%) and Kerala (18%). In this year’s census, Assam has raced to the top with one third (34%) of all turkeys in India, distantly followed by Uttar Pradesh (10%), Jharkhand (8%), Tamil Nadu (7.8%), Andhra Pradesh (7.7%) and Kerala (4.9%).

    There are not all that many turkeys in India – 4,23,374 in the census, compared to 80.78 crore chickens. But this represents a whopping 66.8% increase over 2012, so clearly more people, particularly in Assam, are raising turkeys. Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura also have relatively high numbers of turkeys, so perhaps there is a Northeast trend.

    Turkeys came to India in the early 17th century and, remarkably, there is a visual record of this. In 1612 the emperor Jahangir ordered his courtier Muqarrab Khan “to go to the port of Goa and buy for the private use of the government certain rarities procurable there.” The Portuguese were bringing exotic things from their far-flung colonies and the emperor liked these curiosities.

    What Jahangir got was a turkey and it fascinated him. In the Jahangirnama he describes closely how the bird’s fleshy wattles inflate and change colour: “Its head and neck and the part under the throat are every minute of a different colour. When it is in heat it is quite red – one might say it had adorned itself with coral – and after a while it becomes white in the same places, and looks like cotton.” Jahangir ordered it painted and the resulting image, probably by Ustad Mansur, one of the greatest illustrators of animals, is one of the most weirdly beautiful Mughal paintings.

    It was the Spanish, not the Portuguese, who first took turkeys out of their native homelands in the Americas. Christopher Columbus probably encountered them in Central America in 1502 and by 1512 Spanish explorers were sending gallopavos, or chicken-peacocks as they called them, back to Europe. But it was the Portuguese, always alert to possibilities of trade, who saw how these strange looking birds could appeal to the considerable market for exotic animals, exactly for rich patrons like Jahangir.

    Turkeys, which were already domesticated by the Aztecs, were ideal, small enough to transport easily, strange enough to be worth taking. But the Portuguese were deliberately vague about their origins – it was government policy to conceal sources of products in order to control their supply. So while the Portuguese knew where the birds came from, calling them galinha do Peru, chickens of Peru (Peru was then the term for the entire Spanish empire in South America) they deliberately allowed others to be confused.

    Some places, like England, assumed they came from Turkey and called them that, but others assumed they came from India, that reliable source of exotic things. The French ‘d’Inde’, meaning from India, became its French name dindon. In Turkey itself they came to be called Hindi, the Turkish term for anything Indian.

    The Dutch and other North Europeans assumed them they came, like exotic Indian spices, from Calicut, and called them names like kalkoen. This, even more confusingly, sometimes became ‘Calcutta hens’, which the Swedish botanist and priest, Olof Toreen, noted ruefully, in the diary of his trip to India in 1750, “for this reason I looked for them here, and only found them in one place, and to the best of my remembrance I was told they were foreign in this country.”

    It is notable though that Toreen did find one, which suggests that raising of turkeys had begun. Their early reputation as exotic curiosities, combined with their abundance of flesh, quickly made them the large fowl of choice in Europe for special feasts like Christmas, displacing earlier choices like swans (not fleshy enough) and geese (too greasy). The gazettes, or official reports, that the British started publishing in India note that small flocks of turkeys were being raised by Christians.

    In 1835 Daniel Wilson, the Bishop of Calcutta complained in his journal that his chaplain in Chinsurah, the port further up the Hooghly, “could not find a single boatman to take a live turkey to Calcutta. A dead turkey they would have taken, but not a live one.” (Rather oddly, Wilson attributed this to “the wretched, absurd and unalterable distinctions of caste” though it seems more likely a boatman was wary of a large, irate live bird on his boat). Chinsurah had been founded by the Portuguese, then passed to the Dutch, and at some point the raising of turkeys for the rich British in Calcutta must have started.

    The damp climate of Bengal probably wasn’t ideal for turkeys and in the Raj at Table David Burton notes that so many died young that “the Indian breeders were obliged to put a high price on the survivors” which didn’t encourage widespread consumption. By contrast Flora Annie Steele and Grace Gardiner, in their Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook write that “turkeys are very easy to rear in India, at least Northern India, owing to the dryness of the climate. They recommend feeding them with dahi and plenty of chopped greens.

    John Lall, the Indian Civil Services officer who was commissioner of Agra district, wrote in the Times of India how his wife always insisted on having a turkey for Christmas, getting one well in advance so she could ensure it was well fed in its last weeks to ensure maximum plumpness. But at one time during the Second World War years most turkeys were commandeered for the Allied troops, leaving them with just one scrawny specimen. But their master cook Ramzan was equal to the occasion: “He laid breasts of chicken under the shrunken skin of the lean bird until it looked for all the world like Mae West. The roast turkey was a culinary triumph.”

    Burton writes that the problems of getting good turkeys led many people to substitute peacocks for them for special occasions, but this practice must have almost vanished after Independence and peacocks became protected as India’s national bird. There are few Indian recipes specifically for turkey - the turkey varuval which is served in the so-called Chettinad restaurants in Chennai seems to be a bit of a gimmick, applying a standard technique to cook poultry of any kind, in order to add some interest to their menu.

    Many clubs dating from the Raj continued to serve roast turkey for Christmas, made to standard British recipes, but with plenty of gravy provided to make the rather dry and tasteless meat more interesting. In a detailed recipe given in ToI in 2009 the legendary Taj chef Ananda Solomon painstakingly explains how to make the roast moist with plenty of fatty bacon, and devotes almost as much space to describing how to make a good gravy.

    Anglo Indians often avoided turkeys, preferring chickens and ducks that were easier to get and tastier. But Bridget White, who grew up in Kolar, another dry place suitable for the birds, does give a recipe for a roast in her Anglo Indian Cuisine book, but immediately follows it with a recipe for Left Over Turkey Roast Devil Dry, where the bland meat is sautéed with plenty of spices. Across the world, in fact, spicy curries made with leftover turkey on Boxing Day, 26th December, are often more relished that the roast bird on Christmas Day.

    Turkey consumption might have remained at this niche level through the world, if it wasn’t for one country. When Israel was founded the Jews who arrived there from Europe wanted to make the pastramis and other processed meat products they were used to consuming, made from beef since they could not eat pork. But large scale raising of cattle for beef was not viable for the climate or restricted geography of Israel, so they looked for alternatives. Chicken was already in high demand, but turkeys offered an alternative with plenty of meat, ideal for removing and processing.

    Israel has really pioneered the mass farming and production of turkey meat products, and for years had the highest per capita consumption of turkey. But as tastes in the USA and other Western countries moved away from red meat, Israeli style processed turkey meat products have become more popular.

    Bland, boneless turkey meat is in demand for institutional catering, like school canteen meals. Turkey Twizzlers, processed turkey extruded in spiral shapes, have become notorious in the UK as a symbol of cheap, but unhealthy school food.

    But the real problem with this mass production is how it has changed the raising of turkeys. When demand for them was niche and seasonal they could be raised in small flocks in fairly good conditions. But mass demand has led to turkeys being factory farmed like chickens, with the cruelties that come from raising big birds in cramped conditions, force fed antibiotics to prevent the diseases that develop from this proximity, and also to encourage them to grow even faster.

    Yet widespread antibiotic use poses real problems of environmental contamination and for human health. It isn’t even stopping diseases – in 2015 an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu virus lead to the culling of more than 100,000 birds. Earlier this year, in April, one Israeli turkey farm reported an outbreak of a highly dangerous form of H5N8 bird flu. Because this appears to have been an isolated case less culling seems to have been needed, but it highlights the dangers of mass poultry farming, particularly in a place of historic poultry biodiversity, like Northeast India, the probable place of origin of all modern chickens.

    In India the Livestock Census classifies all Indian turkeys as Backyard Poultry, meaning generally raised in small flocks and open pens, rather than factory farms. With chickens only 34.8% are Backyard Poultry, while 65.2%, meaning 52.7 crore birds, suffer in poultry farms. One can only hope that as turkey rearing grows in Assam and elsewhere in India they are spared the cruelties and wider dangers of this factory farm fate.


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